[jgrapht-users] JGraphT file headers

[John S. <js...@gm...>]

As part of the 1.0 release, we're planning to streamline the boilerplate at
the top of all of the source files.

The current template is quite verbose, which has a few disadvantages:

* there's extra work involved in filling it out when creating each new
file, which is a burden for new contributors (and their reviewers), and
often leads to mistakes due to copy-and-paste

* it's easy for inconsistencies to creep in over time when contributors
forget to maintain the header (if you compare the change summary at the top
of files with their git history, you'll find many of these)

So here's the proposed new template:

/*
 * (C) Copyright 2008-2016, by Elliot Alderson and Contributors.
 *
 * JGraphT : a free Java graph-theory library
 *
 * This program and the accompanying materials are dual-licensed under
 * either
 *
 * (a) the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1
 * as published by the Free Software Foundation, or (at your option) any
 * later version.
 *
 * or (per the licensee's choosing)
 *
 * (b) the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 as published by
 * the Eclipse Foundation.
 */

We'll be preserving the file-level copyright notice, eliminating the
existing project-level copyright notice which currently appears at the top
of each file.  The start year will be the year the file was created, while
the end year will be 2016 (various reformattings in this release are going
to involve touching every file).  Going forward, for new files,
contributors will be expected to set the start year correctly, and
reviewers should enforce this.

The author name (Elliot Alderson in this example) will be the person who
created the file.  One of the advantages of the old verbose header was that
it tried to be careful to give credit to everyone who worked on the file
over time.  So, with the new format, when contributors make non-trivial
changes to existing files, they should feel free to add themselves as an
explicit author to the file-level copyright, e.g.

 * (C) Copyright 2008-2016, by Elliot Alderson, Dominique DiPierro, and
Contributors.

github will always have the full change history for every file, so "and
Contributors" covers the rest.

 The rest of the header can be copy/pasted verbatim.

The HISTORY.md file will remain an important source of detailed attribution
information (especially since for the svn portion of the project's history,
many contributions were submitted via emailed patches instead of via source
control).  Going forward, we'll be careful to keep this up and also
increase the verbosity where appropriate in order to compensate for the
streamlined headers.  And if you are a historical contributor who would
like to request more specific credit in HISTORY.md, please feel free to
submit a pull request against that file and we'll take a look.

If you have suggestions, questions, or concerns about any of this, please
reply here!

tl;dr:  less is more